(Source: narcotic, via ambitionsarelow)

Egypt, football and revolution

Since the fall of Hosni Mubarak, politics has entered every aspect of Egyptian life - even football. This is most evident in the Cairo derby, a game between arch rivals Al Ahly and Zamalek.

In addition to the well known social issues of illiteracy and innumeracy, there should also be such a concept of as “immappancy”, meaning insufficient geographical knowledge. 

A sphere cannot be represented on a flat plane without distortion, which means all map projections distort in one way or another. Some projections show areas accurately but distort distances or scales, for example; others preserve the shapes of countries but misrepresent their areas.

Many people do not realise how much the ubiquitous Mercator projection distorts the relative sizes of countries. Gerardus Mercator’s projection, published in 1569, was immediately useful because it depicts a line of constant bearing as a straight line, which is handy for marine navigation. The drawback is that it distorts the shapes and areas of large land masses, and the distortion gets progressively worse as you get closer to the poles. (Africa looks about the same size as Greenland under the Mercator projection, for example, even though it is in fact 14 times bigger.) This was not a big problem from 16th-century sailors, of course, and the Mercator projection remains popular to this day.

The image above highlights the myth that persists with it - that Africa is much bigger than it appears on most maps.

Click the image for more details.